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arXiv:2610.27338

Assignment maps for arbitrary reduced quantum dynamics

James Fullwood, Weixiang Ye

quant-phSubmitted Oct 19, 2026• Announced Oct 21, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Given an open quantum system $S$ with environment $E$, we establish a one-to-one correspondence between completely positive trace-preserving (CPTP) maps from $S$ to $E$ and assignment maps initializing the composite system $SE$ in a possibly correlated state prior to unitary evolution. We show that every possible joint state $ρ_{SE}$ can be realized by such assignment maps, which are inherently Hermiticity-preserving and trace-preserving (HPTP). While these maps sacrifice global positivity, we derive a simple necessary and sufficient condition for any local state of $S$ to belong to their domain of validity. Furthermore, we prove that the geometry of this domain is governed by the joint state assigned to the maximally mixed input, ensuring that a non-zero volume of admissible local states can readily coexist with initial system-environment entanglement. Finally, we provide an operational protocol for witnessing such limits of validity.

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Given an open quantum system SSS with environment EEE, we establish a one-to-one correspondence between completely positive trace-preserving (CPTP) maps from SSS to EEE and assignment maps initializing the composite system SESESE in a possibly correlated state prior to unitary evolution. We show that every possible joint state ρSEρ_{SE}ρSE​ can be realized by such assignment maps, which are inherently Hermiticity-preserving and trace-preserving (HPTP). While these maps sacrifice global positivity, we derive a simple necessary and sufficient condition for any local state of SSS to belong to their domain of validity. Furthermore, we prove that the geometry of this domain is governed by the joint state assigned to the maximally mixed input, ensuring that a non-zero volume of admissible local states can readily coexist with initial system-environment entanglement. Finally, we provide an operational protocol for witnessing such limits of validity.
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Quantum control has been a cornerstone of quantum information science, driving major advances in quantum computing, quantum communication, and quantum sensing. Over the years, it has enabled the implementation of arbitrary completely positive and trace-preserving (CPTP) maps; an important next step is to extend control to Hermitian-preserving and trace-preserving (HPTP) maps, which underpin applications such as entanglement detection, quantum error mitigation, quantum simulation, and quantum machine learning. Here we present an efficient and fully constructive method for implementing arbitrary HPTP maps. Unlike existing methods that decompose an HPTP map into multiple CPTP maps or approximate it using bipartite Hamiltonians with large Hilbert spaces, our approach compiles a target HPTP map into a single executable CPTP map whose Kraus rank is guaranteed to be no larger than the intrinsic rank of the target HPTP map plus one, followed by simple classical post-processing. Numerical results for inverse noise channels used in quantum error mitigation, including bosonic photon loss, confirm substantial reductions in resources and highlight scalability in higher-dimensional settings. Together with our numerical benchmarks, these results validate the efficiency and versatility of the proposed framework, opening a route to broader quantum-information applications enabled by HPTP processing.
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Initial system-environment correlations can induce reduced dynamics that depart from the standard completely positive (CP) description. We study when such dynamics can be reproduced by the same global unitary acting on an initial system-environment product state. We show that local preprocessing on the system, applied prior to the joint evolution, can lead to dynamics which are completely positive. We focus on two-qubit system-environment states, with a three-qubit extension when a single ancilla is used to implement Kraus channel preprocessing. We analyze three classes of local operations−-−measurements, unitaries, and Kraus channels−-−and characterize their ability to satisfy dynamics matching while minimally perturbing the initial system state. Local measurements can always enforce dynamics matching but necessarily reduce state fidelity. We numerically investigated local unitary preprocessing. Local unitaries enforce dynamics matching in all tested instances and typically preserve the system state: in 402 numerical cases the average fidelity is 99.8%, more than 92% of cases exceed 99% fidelity, and the minimum fidelity is 94.2%. We show that a two-term Kraus channel, realizable with a single ancillary qubit coupled to the system, achieves dynamics matching with unit fidelity in all tested cases. As a second contribution, we demonstrate that local preprocessing can prevent the emergence of non--completely positive (NCP) reduced dynamics in a time-dependent setting. For a correlated two-qubit experiment with a time-dependent global unitary U(t), the induced compatibility domain is fixed by the initial correlations. For every t in a nontrivial continuous interval, the reduced dynamics are NCP when defined over this domain. We then show that a single, time-independent local unitary applied prior to the joint evolution renders the reduced dynamics CP over the entire interval.